DRESSED
in black and shunning the sunlight, one of Germany’s most notorious
Satanists told a murder trial yesterday that she had learnt to be a
vampire in a Gothic club in North London.

“That was my apprenticeship,” Manuela Ruda, 23, said in the trial
which has sent ripples of alarm through German families.

Frau Ruda and her husband, Daniel, are accused of the murder of a
33-year-old friend — his corpse was found in a coffin in her bedroom,
his face slashed 66 times with a machete, and a pentagram, a geometric
symbol used by Satanists, sliced into his stomach. A scalpel protruded
from his chest. The cause of death was said to be hammer blows and
stabbings.

The couple plead not guilty to murder and argue that they simply obeyed
orders — the Devil’s. The defence team hopes that their evidence will
result in a reduced sentence for diminished responsibility.

“If I kill a person with my car and half his bloody head is left on
my bumpers, it is not the car that goes to jail,” Herr Ruda, 25, said.
“It is the driver who is evil. I have nothing to repent because I did
nothing.”

The trial in the industrial city of Bochum is exposing a strange
subterranean world that seems to be drawing many German schoolchildren.
Pupils have been throwing themselves off viaducts and bridges in ritual
suicides and teachers are reporting frequent cases of Satanist graffiti on
school walls.

According to the prosecution documents, the Rudas set off after the
murder last July to Thuringia in eastern Germany, where a 15-year-old was
murdered by three so-called Children of Satan after a black Mass. The
point, apparently, was to kill themselves in a graveyard there.

Frau Ruda — who called herself Allegra after the daughter of the poet
Byron — demanded that the courtroom windows be blacked out. “She
cannot stand the light. She sleeps all day and comes out only at night,”
her lawyer said. The judge dismissed the request, but allowed her to wear
dark glasses for the duration of the trial, which is expected to be
concluded next week.

Frau Ruda claims to be a vampire. After dropping out of grammar school
she found a part-time job in a hotel in the Scottish Highlands.

No details were given in her evidence, but the prosecution documents
record that when the hotel closed for the winter she went to live in a
cave with a 62-year-old Scot called Tom.

He was tattooed from head to foot with leopards, but is not identified
more closely in the indictment; nor is the exact location of the hotel.
The relationship with the Scot helped to shape Frau Ruda’s taste for the
bizarre.

She moved to London. Her new friends there from the Gothic scene
introduced her to Satanic rituals. “I met ordinary people and I met
vampires,” she said. “At night we visited cemeteries, ruins and woods
and drank blood from voluntary donors.”

Frau Ruda had two teeth extracted in Germany and two animal fangs
implanted.

The young woman — whose only other job appears to have been a short
stint as a baker’s assistant — then embarked on a career as a vampire,
sucking blood from friends and colleagues. The favour was reciprocated and
her neck is now full of scars. “You just have to be sure not to hit the
wrong vein,” she said.

The supposedly Satanic lifestyle is being pursued, according to police,
by several thousand young Germans. Frau Ruda — who became known in the
milieu for her posed photographs near open graves — took it to extremes.
She slept in an open coffin decorated with an upside-down cross, blessed
weapons for obscure rituals and studied books dedicated to “chaotic
magic”.

The Rudas became a couple after Daniel, another school dropout, placed
a lonely heart advertisement in the magazine Metal-Hammer.
“Raven-black vampire seeks Princess of Darkness who hates everybody and
everything,” the advertisement said.

Frau Ruda was enchanted. Together, they dug up graves — Frau Ruda
insisted on being buried alive for a short time — and looked for a blood
sacrifice to offer up to the Devil.

Herr Ruda, on the verge of being dismissed as a used car salesman, had
a dream featuring the digits 666 — said to be the sign of the Devil.
Following the instructions contained in the dream, they married on June 6
(6.6) 2001, then found a blood victim for the following month. The
intention was then to kill themselves and go to Hell.

The victim, Frank Hackert, was invited to a party at Frau Ruda’s
flat, a dark place filled with candles, skulls, handcuffs and pieces of
stone ransacked from graveyards and former concentration camps.

The murder method appears to have been modelled on the album cover of a
band called Cannibal Corpse. The album is called Hammer-Smashed Face
and features a heavily mutilated face.

According to the prosecution, the victim was hit at least twice with a
hammer before the stabbing began. The couple were caught on the run a few
days later. Herr Ruda had just bought a chainsaw in a supermarket,
apparently bent upon a massacre before committing suicide.